Know My Name - a RDR2 Story

Signore Angelo Bronte

Let me tell you a story about a young woman who fell into two crowds: the good and the bad.
Of course, there are pros and cons to each category, but I suppose it only depends on the way you look at it...

TW!: blood, graphic violence
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"Bronte told me all about you, Kambria. Been looking for a way to get you back home all this time."

Blood, watered down by Flat Iron Lake, drips from Kam's hands and into the metal bucket, the water inside already a dull, muddy red. Her legs swing as they dangle off the side of the wooden dock, her hat sitting next to her like she didn't feel fit to wear it. How could she? Every time she wore that hat, she was reminded of Colm--the man who gifted it to her. The main thing that reminded Kam that she was an O'Driscoll--in heart, and by upbringing. Her eyes were trained on her hands, hellbent on scrubbing the distasteful scent from her palms and fingers.

"We made a deal. I get you to him, he gives me what I want."

Kam's nails dig into her skin as she scrubs the dried blood from her palms, scratching old scars and dried skin until she couldn't tell if her hands were still red from irritation or from spots of blood that she had missed to clean off.

"All I had to do was find a way to lure you back to Saint Denis. That's when my boys saw a young boy, hanging around you."

Back to Saint Denis.

Kam's mind wanders, her hands mechanically continuing to scratch and scrub until that tingling sensation settles in. What the hell would Angelo Bronte want with her? He certainly didn't want anything to do with her when she was taken in by Colm all those years ago.

Colm. The name floats in her mind. Maybe he had something to do with this. With Jack going missing and Bronte suddenly becoming aware of her existence–of the fact that she wasn't dead, murdered brutally by the O'Driscoll's. Maybe he had told Bronte so that the billionaire could do his dirty work for him. Maybe Colm wanted her back, and snitching to Bronte was the only way to get Kam back–forcefully or willingly.

Her eyes drift back to her hands, watching them shake as she scrubbed them raw. The dried blood stuck to her skin like glue--or maybe she was just envisioning that it was. She had broken the skin at some point during this ritual, encouraging the question of "whose blood was whose". The smell hadn't left. The burnt smell of gunpowder soaked into her clothes, the stale stench of old artifacts and furniture from the Braithwaites, the heavy odor of smoke, and that God-awful scent of rotting iron and fresh blood.

Kam had thrown up three times on the way back to camp. Practically left a trail of today's lunch everywhere she went. Her throat burned with the bile that settled in her esophagus, and she no longer had an appetite to eat--not that she had one the last couple of days.

It was the sound of horses trotting into camp that made her hands still. She knew it was the rest of the gang--she didn't need to look over her shoulder to know that Dutch was back, and possibly looking for her. She listened to the spurs of cowboy boots echo behind her, some fading off into the far distance while others came closer. Kam didn't take her eyes off of her hands as she scrubbed the remaining blood from her hands.

When her hands were washed clean and raw, Kam looked down at her own clothes. Speckled in blood--not her own--that started from the bottom hem of her vest and stopped at the collar of her shirt. Her shaking hands slowly unbuttoned her vest, starting at the top and making her way down to the bottom. She shrugged off the leather vest, feeding her arms out from the loops before rubbing her hands over her face. The cold, brisk air tickled her skin despite the collared shirt she wore. The vest, surprisingly, did a lot to keep her warm during these early-Summer nights.